Scoot is awesome – I remember using it in my high school world history class and thinking it was a way better review activity than completing a study guide packet. There’s a lot of school counseling topics you can cover with scoot as well. Unfortunately, it’s not a great fit with my students. That is…until […]
Easy Ways to Incorporate Mindfulness Into the Classroom
As I’m sure you’re incredibly aware, mindfulness is very hip right now. It feels a bit like we’re all being hit over the head with it; everywhere I turn there’s another article about it, another book for it, etc. That said, mindfulness is pretty amazing and is particularly important to me because of its research […]
Making “I Have, Who Has” A Little Easier For Your Students
I love “I Have, Who Has” – it feels like a game and is a fun way to review or apply material. The problem is that I don’t like to do ones that are simple repetition (“I have disappointed. Who has disappointed?”). I like the ones that require students to use some brain power to […]
“Teach, Breathe, Learn” – Review and Book Study Ideas
Last year’s admin suggested my co-counselor and I run a book study related to SEL as a way of increasing effective SEL practices among our faculty. New admin is less into this idea (read: not going to give us money to buy the books and encourage faculty to do it) but before they came on […]
Social Filter Lesson Plan: Social Safari
The second lesson in our “social safari” mini-unit was on a topic near and dear to my heart: using your social filter. Thinking before speaking is tough, even for adults. Our second graders seem to be struggling with this a little extra this year; some of it is their age, some is not-yet-developed empathy skills, […]
Conversation Skills Lesson Plan: Social Safari
After we did the study skills/learning skills unit “The Case of the Super Students” (someday I’ll finish blogging about that…) for 2nd grade, my co-counselor and I felt like we had to deliver awesomeness for the rest of our lessons in that grade this year. I also got in my mind that we needed to […]
Better Than You Lesson Plan
The second lesson in 4th grade’s Trudy Ludwig unit was around her book Better Than You (I wrote about our lesson with Just Kidding here). My interim counselor from my maternity leave used this for the first time last spring and I was excited to build on the lesson some more and deliver it myself this year. […]
The Biggest to the Littlest: Switching from High School Counseling to Elementary School Counseling
On the Elementary Exchange FB group, there are often posts asking about transitioning between tier levels as school counselors. For folk out there that may be googling “high school counselor to elementary counselor,” or trying to decide which tier to get their feet wet in: this is for you! While I’ve stayed right in my […]
Just Kidding! Lesson Plan
I’ve sang the praises of Trudy Ludwig’s before before and I’ll do it again: they are phenomenal. So good in fact, that I’m using five of them for this quarter’s lessons with my 4th graders. Each tackles a different issue that my students need help with at this time each year but they share many […]
